Oman in Detail - Day 1

Goodbye Dubai, you beautiful tourist trap....

Hello, history and oil money!

As I had come to expect from two countries so ordered and on their games, the bus left Dubai promptly at 7am, with working air conditioning, a clean interior, and curtains that both closed and decently blocked out the sunlight - decadent! We even arrived slightly earlier than anticipated, around 12:30pm. This despite the fact that I had the audacity to need to use the toilets at the border for a full 40 seconds, including hand washing; something for which the driver yelled at me furiously. He then yelled at us again at the immigration office because the officer was trying to bribe us for visa money. Somehow, that was also our fault. Like I said, we managed to arrive early, despite such egregious wastes of time and had much more success at finding our hotel than we had in Dubai. Predictably for such a conservative Muslim country, there was a Christmas tree in the lobby of our hotel.....

Mutrah Hotel

Naturally, being the party animals that we are, we promptly took a nap. Then we went out to explore the city. The market was an easy 20 minute walk from the hotel and the waterfront an additional 10 minutes. There wasn't really a sidewalk per se for some of the way to the market, but living in Malawi has rid me of any expectations of pedestrian safety.

We wanted traditional Omani food to celebrate our arrival, but we were sorely disappointed at the area's offerings. All along the main road to the corniche and along the waterfront itself, the restaurants were all Indian, with one fancy French exception. Since Indian food constitutes the majority of "international" fare in Malawi, I was not interested. We eventually gave in and asked a taxi driver for help. Evidently, all Omani food is located in the center part of town so, once again, we had another 15-20 minute cab ride in order to do anything. 

Dessert

The Corniche at sunset

After eating, we checked out the market. While it is infinitely annoying (from a Western perspective) that everything closes down in the Middle East between 1 pm and 4 pm for their version of a siesta, it is convenient that things stay open late to accommodate the earlier loss of business time. We had a nice stroll and initial casing of the shops so we could plan our future monetary attack. Of course, every single shop keeper tried to get us to enter his shop, which got annoying after about 10 feet, but we just pretended that we didn't speak English... or French, or German (these guys know how to get customers!)

Winter Holiday 2012 in the Middle East - Oman

Oman is never a place I thought I'd find myself in. Much like all the other countries I knew nothing about before deciding to visit, Oman existed only in the periphery of my consciousness. When my friend suggested it as a possible destination for our trip, I was unnerved because, as a Muslim country located on the Arabian peninsula (and even as a Geography major, I had to look up exactly where on the peninsula), it surely was one of those 'dangerous' places that Western people, especially women shouldn't go, right? WRONG.

Facts about Oman:

• It is a Sultanate, also known as an "absolute monarchy", approximately the size of Kansas.
• It was originally colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century, came under Turkish control for about 100 years and gained independence in 1741.
• For a time, the capital of the Omani empire was located all the way down on Zanzibar - an island off the coast of Tanzania in Africa.
• It only began allowing tourists into the country at the beginning of the 1990s.
• Women have been given the right to be elected to the country's Shura Council since 1997.
• In November 2010, UNDP listed Oman as the nation most improved during the preceding 40 years. 
• According to international indices, it is one of the most developed and stable countries in the world and certainly the most stable country in the Middle East.
• The central desert is an important source of meteorites for scientific analysis.
• The USA established a free trade agreement with it in 2009.

Granted, I learned all of this after setting foot on Omani soil, but I am so glad that I did.  This country, with its mercurial and hauntingly beautiful landscape, its welcoming people, peaceful and well-ordered society, and varied history as a center of trade captured a piece of my heart (and a decent piece of my wallet.) It's not often that I express an interest in returning to a place that I've already visited, but I started mentally preparing myself for a second trip before I had even finished this first one. Of course, it will be a long time before I make it back there because this country is expensive, but mark my words, Oman, we will meet again.

Dubai in Detail - Day 4

December 31st - the last day of 2012 was also our last day in Dubai. We started the day off on a quest to locate the bus ticket office in order to secure our tickets to Muscat for early the next morning (bought for 60 dirham each). Part of this quest involved proving the local people whom we asked for directions wrong; yes, it IS in fact possible to walk to the Al Khanjry Transport  office (Muscat phone: 24700600/Dubai: 04-2959390) from the closest metro station (Al Rigga). It is NOT necessary to spend money on an expensive cab when you can walk for 20 minutes. We are from Boston, okay? We walk everywhere, regardless of the pain or time lost in the process. It's a matter of pride!

After a nice walk and securing our spots on the 7am bus for a grand total of approximately $17 (compare this to over $100 + cab fare to fly), we headed off to confront my high school World History class nemesis. Well, to see the mall named after him, at least.

  

So this guy Ibn Battuta, he made a whole semester of my junior year of high school hell. I know he's not very well known in the West, so I'll  just say he was a world traveler during the 14th century who covered 3 times more distance than Marco Polo and who wrote extensively about his travels. Too extensively, if you would have asked 17 year-old me. We had to do a semester-long project on this guy that took forever, stole pieces of my sanity, and garnered me merely a B grade. I still cringe when I hear him mentioned and think back to late nights dying a replica of his journal in tea to 'age' it. Grrr....

The mall is evidently the world's largest themed shopping mall, which was cool to see but definitely lacked any interesting stores to actually shop in. The architecture was impressive and there were several in-mall educational exhibits that the nerd in me really appreciated. I mean, if we are going to be slaves to mass media-induced consumerism, why not at least learn a little in the process?

Tunisia

Learning about Arab contributions to math and science at the mall.

And finally, 11 years and 8,160 miles later, Mr. Battuta and I made up.

After the mall, we opted for some outdoor sight seeing and checked out the marina. Man, is that place dripping in money. The pictures speak for themselves; no other commentary necessary.

After being made to feel horribly financially inadequate, we decided to play up the role of paupers even further by heading to the nearby public access beach and napping and loitering like homeless women while awaiting the sunset.

 

The one thing we had planned the least before embarking on this trip was what we would do for NYE. We had seen several advertisements but assumed we would be able to find information easily enough to decide once we got to Dubai. In reality, we were so constantly on the move, lost, or passed out from exhaustion during our first three days that we failed to plan anything. We had stopped by an internet cafe the day before to look up options with the intention of calling the various places for more details. That turned out to be much harder than we could have imagined because 70% of the phone numbers attached to the ads were cell numbers. We learned the hard way that we couldn't use the hotel's land line to call these cell numbers and we had never bothered to buy SIM cards for our phones for such a short stay. After subjecting ourselves to the archaic activity of searching the phone book (a paper phone book!) for land line numbers to the venues and getting routed back to those same cell lines, we decided that we were too tired to get crazy anyway, since we had to be at the bus place at 6:30am the next morning.


We chose a Russian restaurant for our NYE dinner because it also offered hookah. While we thoroughly enjoyed the meal and the hookah, the notoriously poor customer service habits of the FSU evidently still hold true even in a place like Dubai. This resulted in our waiter ignoring our requests for the check long enough to ensure that we missed any opportunity to see the fireworks from the Burj Khalifa. (Curveball #4  thrown by Russians.) I wish I could say that I was upset about this but honestly, by that point, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and start the next exciting leg of our journey - OMAN!

Dubai in Detail - Day 3

Day 3 began with Part 2 of  The Big Bus Tour. This time we headed down the shoreline to see all the audacious hotels that we couldn't even afford the entrance fees to look inside of. We "hopped on" just before our 24 hour tickets expired, which meant that we couldn't get off again without having to find our own transport back to Deira. This was just fine with us, since we'd had such a long night before and the entire "beach" loop took almost 2 hours. Here is a sample of all the pretty things we saw:

The Jumeriah and Burj al-Arab hotels

New construction/what Dubai originally looked like - sand and water

Dubai Atlantis Hotel Palm, located on...

The Palm Jumeirah man-made island (courtesy of Conde Nast)

The Marina (as seen from the Palm Jumeirah main artery)

Artificial ski slope at the Mall of the Emirates

A metro station

We eventually got off at one of the malls and window shopped for a bit before heading to the Gold Souk, otherwise known and The Place Where 20 Men All Line Up to Yell the Exact Same Question at You: "You want Louis Vuitton, Gucci handbag, gold watch???" Dude, if I didn't want your fake crap from the 19 people who yelled at me right before you, why do you think I will want yours? (This was a very over-stimulating experience, in case you couldn't tell.)

In front of the daily gold prices sign.

Naturally, I bought things I couldn't really afford. But we won't talk about that....

Next was the Dubai Museum, which was a little hokey but still worth seeing since it's so hard to find any evidence of Dubai's history among all its modern trappings. The fact that this megalopolis started out as a pearl diving community just blows my mind. This ceremonial skirt made out of goat hooves also blows my mind, but for other reasons:

Dubai Museum, housed in the Old Fort, with a Big Bus tour bus

And that ends Day 3, our first day without anything ridiculous or extremely unexpected happening.

Dubai in Detail - Day 2

Now, I admit that normally I am a pretty big snob when it comes to generic 'touristy' things and wouldn't be caught dead on something as bland as a Big Bus Tour. But, considering our limited time to plan and be in the city, the distance between the two parts of Dubai most worth visiting, and the fact that all the fancy building charge hefty entry fees to enter them, we decided that a Hop-On-Hop-Off tour was the most economical and logical thing to do. 

I can only speak for this tour in this city, but two of the things I liked best about this activity were: 1) you have a full 24 hours to use your tickets, so you can split the sightseeing up into 2 days, and 2) a double decker bus provides an awesome vantage point from which to view both tall buildings and intricate urban planning details such as well-manicured esplanades, roundabouts filled with beautiful flowers, etc.You also get a free dhow "cruise" and free entrance to the Dubai Museum.

We "hopped on" in the morning and did the old city part of the tour and the dhow cruise only because we had to give ourselves enough time to prepare for the concert. 

The weather was sunny and gorgeous but surprisingly cold on the open second level of the bus. For anyone taking this tour during the winter months, bring a light jacket! I had my scarf wrapped around my arms like phylacteries in an attempt to shield as much skin from the wind as possible. My face even got a little wind burnt the second day.

 









After resting and changing, we were off to the concert. It was at Meydan Racecourse, which was the only thing we did in Dubai that was truly off the beaten path and not accessible via public transport. We took an expensive taxi ride there thinking that, since the Racecourse is so fancy and new that it must have food venues where we could grab some dinner. It did, technically, but they were merely kiosks for Pizza Inn, KFC, and something else generic and pathetically Western. We downed two tasteless personal pizzas that cost more than we'd spend on two meals earlier in the day and found a place to sit for awhile until the crowd got big enough that we needed to secure our standing area.

And then we waited...and waited...and waited some more. In true diva style, "Dear Old Nicki" made us wait for an excruciating period of time, not appearing on stage until close to 11:30pm and only playing for 45 minutes. In addition, the only "opening acts" we were treated to was a group of marginally talented teenagers performing a few dance routines and some DJs from the local radio station promoting this concert playing Top 40 music to keep us entertained. When she did finally grace us with her presence, she put on a great show. 

The crowd turned out to be entertaining in its own right, as well. There was a shocking number of kids clearly under 18 at the concert and a good deal of actual children, as well. For an artist who likes to curse and sing about sex as much as Nicki Minaj does, we were really surprised to see so many young people. Granted, they were with their mothers, but their mothers clearly had no idea who the artist was. My favorite was the woman who came up behind me and asked if her daughter (around 10 years old) could cut in front of us to go up to the barricade so she would be be able to see. Her reason? "We came all the way from Saudi Arabia to see this concert." Really, lady? First of all, your country is literally adjoining the UAE, so it would be hard to come from a 'closer' country. Secondly, I came from fricking USA/Malawi and will actually remember this event a year from now, unlike your pre-pubescent child. But you never asked about me. I must have looked like a native Emerati, with my European features and tight pants....

Then there was the fight between a woman in a pink wig and some really burly guy that security had to break up, causing us to miss two entire songs as we were jostled around and had our view of the stage blocked.

The last adventure of the evening involved the race to get a cab out of the venue. Someone in charge had set up a sign announcing the 'taxi queue' at one end of the circular drive when you exit the arena. We dutifully got in line and waited, but we soon noticed that 1) clearly no one had bothered to inform any cab companies that there would be hundreds of people wanting to use their services after the concert, resulting in almost no cabs going by and 2) those that did go by all already had people in them. As we got increasingly frustrated, Alaa decided to go see what was going on at the other end of the drive way. About 10 minutes later she goes by in a cab, gets out and yells at me "hurry, I got one" and we dash off before someone can steal it from us. Evidently, no one had bothered to inform the taxis that there was a queue specifically for them, either, so they were simply picking up people at the beginning of the driveway and leaving all the people waiting in line for them S.O.L. I would say surviving this event counts as Curveball #3.

Dubai in Detail - Day 1

Looking at the itinerary in my previous post, I feel like it gives the impression of a smooth, pleasant holiday full of passive sight-seeing and shopping. While those elements did exist, that was most definitely NOT the overall experience. Instead, life threw us a few good curveballs that kept us on our toes.

First of all, Ethiopian Airlines forced me to spend the night in Addis during my layover because they overbooked the second leg of the flight. Or something like that. No one ever bothered to give us an official reason or announcement. About 20 of us were simply left wondering what was going on after 3 hours of standing and being jostled in a crowd in the middle of the night as airline employees randomly boarded people onto transport buses from one end of the crowd and then the other at their whim. (Side note: the fact that Africans can't seem to stand in line and wait their turn for anything - something which highly annoys me - turned out to be justified in this instance because, if I had pushed more, I might have made it on that flight. Maybe I need to stop judging and adapt instead.) Eventually, we were herded to a kiosk and given hotel assignments and new boarding passes for the next day's flight - the exact flight my friend was arriving on, which means I didn't have to wait for 12 hours in the Dubai airport to meet up with her. Definitely a happy ending to curveball #1.

We arrived in Dubai and found our hotel with the help of a random friendly local who simply grabbed the handle of my suitcase and started walking when we stopped to ask him if he knew where the Time Square Hotel was. The fact that he got lost and had to call to ask for directions should have made a bigger impression on us, but we were too tired and excited to put much stock in it. Later, when we got lost trying to get back and realized we hadn't thought to grab a business card with the hotel's name and address on it, we knew we were in trouble. After two hours of wandering around the streets (and the wrong neighborhood for a good chunk of that time) we managed to find our way back to our hotel at 2:30 a.m. Curveball #2 successfully deflected.

The Dubai Festival City Mall's Light & Water Show was okay and a nice, laid back outing after traveling for 24 hours and being overwhelmed by a shiny new city, but it is really just a 10-15 minute event at a mall and is definitely not the most exciting thing to do there. It did prove to be a convenient location to get (mall) food and purchase some toiletries that got confiscated from my friend at the airport. 

Btw, we totally rocked public transport while in Dubai, especially on this first day. We only took cabs a couple of times when we were either late or lost. Other than that, we managed to get everywhere we needed to be except for one place on the metro or, in the case of the Festival City Mall, the public bus! That's right, there are buses in Dubai. You know, mostly for the the anonymous plebs who make this fantasy city run, but that's okay. The system also benefits cheap tourists on occasion, too.

Winter Holiday 2012 in the Middle East - Dubai

Dubai truly is a land of superlatives and, coming off of 5 months of living in small town Malawi, that suited me just fine. In fact, it was a news story on the Emirate's newest superlative that finally lit the fire under my butt to write about my holiday excursion there.

A friend from grad school and I decided at the last minute instead of making Dubai a layover on our way to some less-developed, more-expensive-to-fly-to locale, to make it the actual vacation (well, part of it; the other half will be described in another post). This left us less than a month to plan for a city neither of us knew much about or had ever given much thought to. Also, since we are both living in Africa, it's not like we could exactly hop on over to the local bookstore and peruse one of the multiple shiny guidebooks probably on offer back in the States.

Despite these restrictions, we threw together what turned out to be a pretty enjoyable 4-day trip; one which wouldn't even have been that expensive if I could have stopped buying things.....

Our itinerary:

1. Thursday: arrive in afternoon, check in and go see the Dubai Festival City Mall Light & Water Show
2. Friday:  be embarrassingly touristy by taking a Big Bus "Hop-On-Hop-Off" tour around the old part of the city, followed by the splurge of a Nicki Minaj concert
3. Saturday: take the second leg of the Big Bus tour to see all the audacious hotels and skyscrapers and check out some of the malls
4. Sunday: hit the Gold Souk, visit the Jumeirah public beach, gawk at the marina, see the Ibn Battuta Mall, celebrate NYE

Details and impressions next post....